SoundCloud, Deezer and Pandora Buying Through Private Deals

We buy SoundCloud, Deezer and Pandora through private marketplace deals against a named publisher list, never through the open exchange. The reason is a number: across the audio auctions we have audited for clients since 2023, between eight and twenty percent of open-exchange impressions could not be tied to a real listening session. Server-side ad insertion leaves no browser to inspect, which makes audio unusually easy to misreport, so we took the open exchange out of the plan rather than filter it afterwards. Supply path: SoundCloud and Deezer inventory served through AdsWizz. Pandora through SXM Media, and only for United States expansion, since Pandora does not operate in Germany and a plan that puts it in a DACH flight was written by somebody who did not check. Radio simulcast through Triton's a2x or DAX where a client wants reach beyond on-demand listening. On the buy side, Adform or Xandr for DACH-weighted flights, DV360 when your Google stack is already the reporting source of truth, The Trade Desk for the United States. Every deal ID arrives with a publisher list attached, and we re-pull that list monthly, because lists change quietly and nobody sends an email about it. Verification: Audio serves on VAST 4.x. DAAST was folded into VAST 4.1 back in 2018, so a publisher still quoting DAAST 1.0 is telling you the age of their ad stack, and we treat that as a pricing signal rather than a dealbreaker. DoubleVerify or IAS audio measurement runs on every deal from the first impression, not bolted on after somebody notices a problem. Completion rate is not a quality signal in this channel: most placements cannot be skipped, so ninety-eight percent completion means the format worked, not that the advertising did. Where skipping is possible we buy on listen-through, and the plan says which is which. What we do with the three of them: SoundCloud reaches a German audience at an age no other streaming platform reaches at the same cost, and the creative that works there is not the creative that works on Deezer, which skews older and towards France while holding a real German base. So we build separate spots per platform rather than trafficking one spot three ways and calling it efficiency. Sequential frequency is capped in the DSP across all three, not per publisher, which is the difference between one plan and three plans sharing a spreadsheet. Billing and reconciliation: Invoices reconcile against DSP-reported delivery, not publisher-reported. Discrepancy tolerance is three percent, and anything above that is a conversation before it is a payment. Media is billed at net cost with our fee stated separately. We take no rebate from any supply partner and will write that into the contract. Not included: Open exchange audio. Audio bundled into a display insertion order, which is how it gets sold to people who are not paying attention. Rewarded audio in mobile games, where the listener is looking at a different screen and waiting for the ad to end. Podcast inventory, which is a separate discipline and a separate service here. Creative production is quoted separately, because buying and making are different jobs and pretending otherwise is how a plan ends up built around whichever spot already existed. Who this is not for: Anyone under roughly 25,000 euro a month across the three platforms. Private deals are negotiated one at a time, and negotiating them for a small budget wastes your money before it wastes our time. Anyone who wants Pandora but does not sell in the United States. And anyone who needs this channel measured in isolation: streaming audio contributes, it rarely closes, and a buyer who requires it to close will cancel it in month two and blame the channel.